“We don’t seem to live on the same planet…” — a fictional planetarium

“We don’t seem to live on the same planet…” — a fictional planetarium for the catalog in edited by Kathryn B. Hiesinger & Michelle Millar Designs for Different Futures, Philadelphia Museum of Art &The Art History of Chicago (initially given as the Loeb Lecture, Harvard, GSD) 2019, pp; 193-199.

Abstract

Architects and designers are facing a new problem when they want to build for a habitable planet. They have to answer a new question because what used to be a lame joke: “My poor fellow you seem to live on another planet”, has become literal: “Yes indeed, we do intend to live on a different planet!”. In the old days, when political scientists talked about geopolitics, they meant different nations with opposite interests waging wars on the same material and geographical stage. Today, geopolitics is also concerned with wars about the very definition of the stage itself. A conflict will be called, from now on, “of planetary relevance” not because it has the planet for a stage, but because it is about which planet you are claiming to inhabit and to defend.